FILE - In this Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013 photo provided by the Japan Transport Safety Board shows the distorted main lithium-ion battery, left, and an undamaged auxiliary battery of the All Nippon Airways' Boeing 787 which made an emergency landing on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013 at Takamatsu airport in Takamatsu, western Japan. Japan's transport safety agency says a lithium ion battery on a Boeing 787 that overheated during an All Nippon Airways flight earlier this month, prompting an emergency landing, was not overcharged. (AP Photo/Japan Transport Safety Board) EDITORIAL USE ONLY, NO SALES
FILE - In this Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013 photo provided by the Japan Transport Safety Board shows the distorted main lithium-ion battery, left, and an undamaged auxiliary battery of the All Nippon Airways' Boeing 787 which made an emergency landing on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013 at Takamatsu airport in Takamatsu, western Japan. Japan's transport safety agency says a lithium ion battery on a Boeing 787 that overheated during an All Nippon Airways flight earlier this month, prompting an emergency landing, was not overcharged. (AP Photo/Japan Transport Safety Board) EDITORIAL USE ONLY, NO SALES
FILE - In this Friday, Jan. 18, 2013 file photo, an All Nippon Airways' Boeing 787 "the Dreamliner" parks on the tarmac as a Japan Airlines' Boeing 767 airplane takes off at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. ANA and JAL said they replaced lithium-ion batteries in their Boeing 787 Dreamliners on multiple occasions before a battery overheating incident led to the worldwide grounding of the jets. ANA said Wednesday, Jan. 30, it replaced batteries on its 787 aircraft some 10 times because they failed to charge properly or showed other problems, and informed Boeing about the swaps. JAL said it had also replaced lithium-ion batteries on its 787 jets but couldn't immediately give details. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara, File)
TOKYO (AP) ? U.S. regulators said Wednesday they asked Boeing Co. to provide a full operating history of lithium-ion batteries used in its grounded 787 Dreamliners after Japan's All Nippon Airways revealed it had repeatedly replaced the batteries even before overheating problems surfaced.
National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson said the agency made the request after recently becoming aware of battery problems at ANA that occurred before a Jan. 7 battery fire in a 787 parked at Boston's Logan International Airport. Boeing has already collected some of the information, he said.
ANA said it had replaced batteries on its 787 aircraft some 10 times because they failed to charge properly or showed other problems, and informed Boeing about the swaps. Japan Airlines also said it had replaced 787 batteries. It described the number involved as a few but couldn't immediately give further details.
All 50 of the Boeing 787s in use around the world remain grounded after an ANA flight on Jan. 16 made an emergency landing in Japan when its main battery overheated.
Lithium-ion batteries are prone to overheating and require additional safeguards to prevent fires. However, ANA spokeswoman Megumi Tezuka said the airline was not required to report the battery replacements to Japan's Transport Ministry because they did not interfere with flights and did not raise safety concerns.
Having to replace batteries on aircraft is not uncommon and was not considered out of the ordinary, she said.
Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, said in Washington that the agency was checking whether the previous battery incidents had been reported by Boeing.
With 17 of the jets, ANA was Boeing's launch customer for the technologically advanced airliner. The airline has had to cancel hundreds of flights, affecting tens of thousands of people, but has sought to minimize disruptions by switching to other aircraft as much as possible.
The battery problems experienced by ANA before the emergency landing were first reported by The New York Times.
Japanese and U.S. investigators looking into the Boeing 787's battery problems shifted their attention this week from the battery-maker, GS Yuasa of Kyoto, Japan, to the manufacturer of a monitoring system. That company, Kanto Aircraft Instrument Co. makes a system that monitors voltage, charging and temperature of the lithium-ion batteries.
On Tuesday, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it was conducting a chemical analysis of internal short circuiting and thermal damage of the battery that caught fire in Boston.
The probe is also analyzing data from flight data recorders on the aircraft, the NTSB said in a statement on its website.
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Joan Lowy reported from Washington.
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Follow Elaine Kurtenbach on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ekurtenbach
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